They’re at it again! Originally created by Congress in 2007, the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program provided low-cost government loans that were subsidized, and then in part eaten as we now know, by hapless and strung-out American taxpayers. In 2011, it was left behind as dead, but now the government wants to bring that zombie back.

By Philippe Casey of OilPrice.com: The US shale revolution is leaving its marks. In 2009, the US surpassed Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas. In May, production exceeded imports for the first time in 16 years. In 2020, the US might overtake Saudi Arabia as the top oil-producing nation. But there aren’t enough pipelines in place to handle it.

The Fed’s taper “may not be smooth,” explained Bank of England deputy governor Charles Bean at the central-banker shindig in Jackson Hole. He was referring to the currencies, bonds, and stocks of emerging-market economies such as Brazil, Indonesia, and India that have gotten massacred.

By Lee Adler, The Wall Street Examiner: Durable goods data was shockingly bad. For a change, the seasonally adjusted data wasn’t misleading. The actual data, not seasonally adjusted, was just as bad. After backing out inflation, real durable goods orders continue to trend down – though we keep hearing BS about that US "manufacturing renaissance."

I expected the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to contact me in an icily polite manner and make me recant, and I almost expected some goons to show up with an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I half expected Microsoft to shut down my computers remotely and wipe out my data. But none of that happened. Instead, the BSI confirmed the key points.

In this installment from Chapter 25, “DEALS GONE WILD: Rise of the Debt Zombies,” of his bestseller, David Stockman vivisects the LBO craze before the financial crisis, including the insane and largest ever buyout, Texas mega-utility TXU Corporation – now in bankruptcy. And then there is Goldman....

While Texas hadn’t experienced the crazy run-ups in home prices that other cities had seen during the housing bubble, it did experience a collapse in demand for new homes. For builders the story was bloody. In Dallas, half of them didn’t make it. But now, prices in the delayed Texas housing bubble hit all-time highs. Builders are giddy. And cracks are forming.

By Don Quijones:Hyper-connected Goldman Sachs has managed to manipulate and profit from every financial bubble since the Roaring Twenties. And now they’re doing it all over again with the creation of a carbon trading bubble. But Goldman is not the only one with skin in the game.

He came out and said what no one in the power structure was allowed to say. It was blasphemy against Abenomics that rules governmental thinking. Abenomics wouldn’t solve Japan’s fiscal and economic problems, he said. And the government’s outlook was way too rosy. But “without realistic figures, a real debate on fiscal reform can’t begin.”

By Lee Adler, The Wall Street Examiner: There’s been a lot of talk over the past year about the housing “recovery.” But the fact of the matter is that in terms of new single-family homes, there’s no genuine recovery, but there’s certainly a bubble in prices.

Refinancing mortgages is phenomenally profitable for banks – one of the few growth sectors actually spawned by the Fed’s herculean efforts to force down long-term interest rates through waves of quantitative easing. Banks went on a hiring binge to shuffle all this paper around and extract fees. But now, with rising rates, that business is getting decimated.

Experts at the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) determined that Windows 8, the touch-screen enabled, super-duper, but sales-challenged operating system is dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a backdoor – with keys likely accessible to the NSA.

By Andrey Dashkov, Casey Research: In the mining business, it is said that grade is king. A high-grade project attracts money. High-grade drill intercepts can multiply an exploration company's stock price. The higher the grade, the more technical sins and price fluctuations a mine can survive. But gold grades of the top mines have plunged, and it’s complicated....

Printing money and forcing interest rates to near zero, that’s how the Fed and other central banks papered over the Financial Crisis, duct-taped the bursting credit bubble back together, inflated new asset bubbles, and propped up TBTF banks. It accomplished a huge feat: a worldwide tsunami of hot money. Which is now receding.

By Dennis Miller, Miller’s Money: When I was a young buck out in the workplace, financial magazines published worksheets for calculating when you had enough money to retire. The process became easier when we got our first PC. For years, financial planners considered four basic numbers to be conservative estimates. But that all blew up in the fall of 2008.

The new salvation religion being preached in Japan to a hardened and cynical bunch who’ve lived through one of the worst bubbles and busts in recent history is this: prodigious money-printing will devalue the yen, causing exports to skyrocket and imports to shrink. The resulting trade surplus will save Japan. But the opposite is happening. And fast!

By John Mauldin: We are told they don't ring a bell when bull or bear markets start. But it does seem that there are signs as we approach turning points. This week in my reading I have been struck by a number of signs that suggest that, if we haven't reached a top in the latest bull market cycle, at least a pause may be in order.

China is the promised land for our revenue-challenged tech heroes: 1.2 billion consumers, economic growth several times that of the US, and companies splurging on IT. Layer the “cloud” on top, and China is corporate nirvana: a high-growth sector in a high-growth country. Or was nirvana, now that the NSA’s hyperactive spying practices have spilled out.

The $47 billion buyout of TXU was a bet on a truly aberrational price gap between coal and natural gas that couldn’t possibly last, writes David Stockman. “So the largest LBO in history was the ultimate folly of bubble finance.” It generated $1 billion in fees and an “epic $32 billion payday” for shareholders, “including the hedge funds that had front-run the deal.”